October 23, 2025

Dear Alumni,

My parents were in town last weekend and requested that we visit the Monet and Venice exhibition now on view at the Brooklyn Museum. The show includes a gallery with eighteenth-century depictions of Venice created around the Grand Tour, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a quotation by Hester Piozzi—the subject of my BGC Qualifying Paper—as the epigraph for a wall text. I’m always excited to spot unexpected references to this entertaining writer, whom I first encountered in Professor Jeffrey Collins’s BGC seminar on the Grand Tour and have continued to think about in my research to this day.

Speaking of reminiscing on time spent at BGC: the date for our Autumn Alumni Event is fast approaching. We will be touring Designing Motherhood, an exhibition curated by Amber Winick (MA ’13), on Thursday, November 13 at the Museum of Arts & Design. Our tour guide will be Elizabeth Koehn (MA ’20, current PhD candidate), who is the site curator for the show. If you haven’t RSVPed, it isn’t too late! Click here.

As always, you can share your latest news via this online form. I look forward to hearing your updates!

All best,

Julia Carabatsos (MA ’22)
alumni@bgc.bard.edu

Alumni Spotlight

Genevieve Ward Swenson (MA ’05) began a new position as Adult Public Programs Manager at Pequot Library in Southport, Connecticut. Founded in 1889 by Virginia Marquand Monroe and Elbert B. Monroe, Pequot Library was designed by Robert H. Robertson and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The library is a destination institution with significant special collections of rare books, manuscripts, and archives. Genevieve notes that she is eager to collaborate on lectures, workshops, and symposia with BGC alumni!

J. Cabelle Ahn (MA ’15) recently wrote in Cultured magazine about the “new guard of gallerists” who are “pushing the art world forward by looking back into history.” She profiles seven young dealers, including Martina D’Amato (MA ’12, PhD candidate), managing director of Cora Ginsburg LLC.

Select Career Opportunities

The American Antiquary Society welcomes applications for its summer 2026 conservation internship. The conservation internship was established in 2020 to provide training opportunities for graduate students with a specialization in book or paper conservation. This internship program allows candidates to work in the Society’s conservation department. The goal of the internship is to afford emerging conservation professionals hands-on experience by actively participating in a wide range of conservation and preventative care activities in a rare book library setting.

The Art Museum at the University of Toronto is currently seeking a Curator of Exhibitions and Collections. Reporting to the executive director and working with the museum’s team, the curator will research, initiate, develop and implement original, guest-curated and collection-based exhibitions and outreach relevant to the museum’s forward-looking program. Applications are due on November 14.

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute is pleased to invite papers from graduate students for a one-day symposium, “Color and Photography Before 1960” on April 10, to be held in person at the Clark in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The aim of this symposium is to reflect on the developments—technological, aesthetic, psychological, and political—from 1839 to 1960 that defined the look, uses, and meanings of color(ed) photographs, broadly defined. Interested participants are invited to submit an abstract of no more than 350 words along with a brief CV to colorandphotoconference@gmail.com by November 18, 2025.

In the first phase of its mission to acquire and conserve the artist’s archives, Wendell Castle Project is seeking an archivist to perform an assessment of materials and provide a general overview/inventory and recommendations for storage and conservation requirements. This is an on-site position and is expected to take no more than six months of full time work or 12 months of part time work. There will be the potential for the position to evolve into a long term appointment, as the next phase will involve the complete cataloguing of the archives. https://furnsoc.org/opportunities/archivist

For more job listings please visit the BGC job board.
username: careerservices
password: CareersBGC2025-6*=*

Select BGC Events

Exhibiting Oceania: New Perspectives
A conversation with Fred Myers (NYU), Healoha Johnston (Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum), and Albert Refiti (Auckland University of Technology), moderated by Maia Nuku (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Wednesday, November 12 at 6 pm

Following the recent refurbishment of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bard Graduate Center invites leading scholars to discuss some of the challenges and opportunities for international museums in presenting the arts and cultures of the Pacific. Dr. Maia Nuku (Evelyn A. J. Hall and John A. Friede Curator for Oceanic Art in the Metropolitan Museum), who coordinated the reinstallation of the galleries of Oceanic art, will moderate. Taking the new exhibition as a starting point, the panelists will raise issues about art and architecture and discuss the rich conceptual values that inform the distinctive visual output and built environment produced by Indigenous Pacific and Islander communities who live and work in the vast region known as Oceania. Challenges include overcoming cultural unfamiliarity and the persistence of stereotypes, confronting the consequences of past and present colonialism, and addressing the resilience of Oceanic identities in what Tongan scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa called “Our Sea of Islands.”

Open Houses for Prospective Students
November 9 (on Zoom) at 11 am
November 16 (in person) at 11 am

If you know any prospective students, I encourage you to share information about BGC’s Open Houses. These events give prospective students the opportunity to learn about BGC’s MA and PhD programs. Participants hear from faculty about their research and teaching and meet current students. In-person open houses also include a tour of the academic building and gallery.

Select External Events

Stradanus at Cooper Hewitt
Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum
November 6–7

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum will be hosting the symposium “Stradanus at Cooper Hewitt” as the culmination of its multi-year Stradanus Project. With support from the Getty’s Paper Project Initiative and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Collections Program, Cooper Hewitt embarked on the Stradanus Project, an effort to conserve, research, and digitize Stradanus’s drawings, which served as preparatory designs for his engravings. Over two days, 14 curators, scholars, and conservators will present new research on Stradanus. In addition to these presentations, there will be viewings of Cooper Hewitt’s Stradanus holdings in the Drue Heinz Study Center for Drawings and Prints. To register for the symposium, please click here.

Shop the BGC Store!

Visit our online store at store.bgc.bard.edu for 40% off all items. Enter code ALUMNI at checkout to receive the discount.

Sign up for Gaggle!

Gaggle.mail is an opt-in list-serv that serves as a place to share job openings, conference attendance, published books/articles, and exhibition openings directly with fellow alums. It’s a communication forum for alumni, by alumni. To circulate your news in the Gaggle group, send an email to bgcalumni@gaggle.email.